A variety of portable electronic devices nowadays are provided with components for capturing images. Examples of such electronic devices include portable communication devices which may include a camera. For illustration, modern mobile telephones or personal digital assistants may be equipped with a camera. With increasing data transmission bandwidths, the transmission of an image or of a video sequence which includes plural images over a mobile communication network is becoming increasingly popular. There is a wide variety of applications for transmitting images taken with a portable electronic device. In one approach, images may be received at a portable communication device before an image is captured, so as to allow the user of the portable communication device to identify a camera position and attitude which matches a viewing angle used for capturing the older image, or which is complementary with the viewing angle of the older image.
A portable communication device may also be used to download images from image libraries which are publicly accessible, for example by accessing the image library over a wide area network. Such approaches may be of limited value to a user of a portable electronic device when the user is interested in knowing whether someone he or she knows has taken an image, rather than merely retrieving an image taken by a person unknown to the user.